


Of tar and rust

by achillese



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Dark, M/M, Post-Finale, Post-Hell, Season/Series 08 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-30
Updated: 2013-09-30
Packaged: 2017-12-28 02:00:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/986317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/achillese/pseuds/achillese
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam and Dean find Adam wandering around on the highway - lost, confused, and babbling something about Michael. None of it's what they expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of tar and rust

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Midam Week 2013 on Tumblr. Darker than I anticipated. Bring something to cuddle.

There were ghosts in his eyes. Neither Sam nor Dean could figure out where they’d come from – where _he’d_ come from, for that matter – but they knew no amount of staring openmouthed would provide any answers. They simply, quietly, confusedly, tried to wrap their minds around the fact that their younger half-brother was standing in the middle of the highway they’d been driving on. 

“Adam?” Dean asked, as though speaking his name aloud would grant some kind of answer from the Powers That Be. 

If it really was Adam, he looked horrible, for starters. His jeans were almost completely dark red with a mixture of dirt and blood and his shirt was barely held together anymore, hanging loose off his body by a few threads at most. Every inch of his skin was covered with a layer of mud and his hair was so matted and clumped together that it looked rock solid. 

His eyes, though. His blue eyes were clear as day, bright against the grit that was the rest of his body, but there was something missing in them that Dean couldn’t quite explain. 

Adam explained for them both:

“Michael’s dead.”

\---

They tested him sixteen ways to Sunday once they arrived at the nearest roadside motel. The boys used everything from salt water (they bathed him in it to clean him off and make wholly certain he wasn’t possessed; two birds with one stone) to silver (they hung an anti-possession chain made of silver around his neck) and beyond. Adam passed every test, though he didn’t speak much. His eyes stared blankly ahead, focusing on nothing in particular. He was so quiet that if Sam didn’t see the slow rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, he’d think the kid was dead. 

But he wasn’t. _Michael_ was, but not Adam. 

Adam tried to explain it the best he could while lying down on the hotel bed, dressed in some of Dean’s old clothing (still slightly too big for him) with the thin robe draped over him as a makeshift blanket because Adam hadn’t wanted to slip under the covers. His feet protruded out from under the robe as he talked, voice hoarse. He used short sentences – quick and to the point. There was no room for detail or purple prose. The Cage broke open after the angels fell. Michael and Lucifer had somehow been long dead before that. Adam was the only thing that had crawled out. He wandered. He starved. He followed the highway. The Winchesters found him. End of story.

(Even when Adam finally fell into a light sleep, the Winchesters conducted about seven extra tests on him just to be sure. Just to be really, very sure. They’d already been fooled once. Never again.)

\---

“What do we do with him?”

That seemed to be the central question. They had no answers. They just moved from motel to motel, dragging a silent Adam along for the ride. Dean suggested once that they take him to a hospital and leave him there for safekeeping, but Sam absolutely refused. 

“We’re not leaving him behind anymore,” he’d said, and that was that. 

Kevin texted them every other day to keep track of where they were. The Winchesters left out the part about finding their younger brother wandering the highway. That kind of information was best told in person, not via text message. 

\---

A week and a half passed and Adam still wasn’t speaking much. He talked in broken sentences, in fragments that sometimes sounded vaguely iambic in nature. Sometimes he trailed off in the middle of a word, sometimes he opened his mouth and closed it again, but the rare moments when he completed a thought were the most telling, because in the end it appeared that the only few sentences he could finish were things like, “I’m hungry,” “I’m tired,” “Michael’s dead.”

Sam and Dean still didn’t know all the details on how that had happened, but it was clear that Adam was still trying to wrap his warped mind around the idea. He said it at random intervals as though testing the weight of the words against his tongue, tasting the truth of it. 

Once Dean privately suggested to Sam that it was more than likely that Michael and Lucifer had just killed each other off in the Cage. Sam shuddered at the idea of Adam having been alone down there all this time, but it was the only thing that made sense.

What _didn’t_ make sense was why Adam was so attached to the idea of Michael dead, why it mattered in the first place.

\---

They still didn’t know what to do with Adam. In the end, they decided to bring him back to the Bunker for ‘safekeeping,’ as though they were locking away a precious object. At least there they could introduce him to Kevin, maybe get him to open up to someone who was closer to his own age. Maybe that was what Adam needed – a friend, someone who wasn’t related by blood, someone who could understand what it meant to be a pawn in a much larger, more dangerous game. 

Adam sat in the backseat of the Impala as Dean drove while Sam was slouched down in the passenger seat taking a nap. The youngest of the three stared out the window, eyes vacant as the landscape changed from town to town, sometimes giving way completely to open fields or stretches of woods. His expression never changed no matter how many times Dean looked at him in the rearview mirror; if anything, he looked as though he were growing more tired. 

“You should take a nap,” Dean suggested about twenty minutes after he last looked at Adam.

The boy shook his head, his shaggy gold hair falling in front of his eyes. 

Dean tried again. “Seriously, Adam. You look beat. Staying awake’s not gonna make the drive go any quicker.”

“I can’t sleep.”

Dean sighed. Adam barely slept in all the time he’d been with them, and even when he did manage to catch a few winks, his sleep was restless, full of grunts and groaning and the occasional whine of discomfort. Dean thought maybe he was reliving Hellish nightmares, but he never did feel like it was an appropriate thing to ask. 

The elder Winchester adjusted his grip on the steering wheel. “Well...at least shut your eyes?”

Adam hesitated before doing just that, resting his head against the window as he closed his eyes. Dean watched him through the mirror for another few seconds before refocusing on the road ahead.

\---

As Sam and Dean had hoped, when they arrived back at the Bunker, Kevin took to Adam with open, sympathetic arms. He’d heard about Adam from the Winchesters – little snippets of explanation they'd eventually provided over the phone or through a text message despite their earlier decision not to – so Kevin knew the very bare bones of who Adam was and where he’d been the past few years. As someone who’d also been the victim of a crime he couldn’t control, Kevin understood, and he didn’t question Adam about any of it. 

Kevin simply latched on and tried to make the best of a bad situation. 

\---

Sam and Dean tried their best not to leave the Bunker as much during the following weeks, but occasionally at least one of them would have to run into town for supplies, leaving one Winchester and one Kevin behind to hang out with Adam.

They tried to refer to it as ‘hanging out’ instead of ‘watching over,’ but in all honesty that was what it really was: watching Adam, making sure he was stable enough to accomplish even the most basic of human tasks. He still didn’t sleep much, but at least now he was able to eat on his own and take showers. 

He still mentioned Michael on occasion (“Michael’s dead” “I know, Adam, I know”) and eventually everyone had no choice but to come to the conclusion that there’d been something more between Adam and Michael than they originally thought. 

\---

“I want to go for a walk,” Adam said one day, startling Sam and Kevin out of the books they’d been reading. 

Adam stood at the top of the balcony, staring down at the two of them with the usual blank look in his eyes. Sam and Kevin looked at each other for a moment before Sam said, “I’ll come with you.”

“I want to go alone.”

Sam frowned as he stood up from the table. “That’s not gonna happen.”

“Why not?”

“Something could happen to you.”

“Something already did.”

Pink colored Sam’s cheeks. “That’s not what I...” He averted his gaze from Adam for a moment before trying again. “Look, I get that you’re probably feeling cooped up in here, but it’s for your own protection. We don’t know if anyone or any _thing’s_ out there looking for you, and you’re safest in here.”

“I’m done being trapped.”

It was with those four words that Sam let his little brother walk out the door.

\---

Adam didn’t wander in any specific direction; he just wanted the fresh air, the sunlight on his face. He stumbled through the nearby woods, occasionally looking up at the sky as though waiting for some divine sign, but in the end he just kept walking. 

His legs felt unbalanced, his throat dry and his stomach empty. His whole body felt like it was too light, like if a gust of wind came by it’d blow him right over, and so with a small huff he sat down on a patch of grass, legs bent at the knee in front of him as he reclined against a tree.

Adam stared out at the space in front of him and licked his lips to moisten them. “Michael’s dead,” he said aloud.

The words felt heavy against his tongue, but they were manageable. 

He swallowed hard and tried again, tried saying the impossible: “Adam’s dead.”

His voice cracked on the second word; he could barely stand the bitter taste in his mouth. 

He said it again, forced it out: “Adam’s dead.”

A twig cracked behind him and Sam’s voice came out of nowhere, accusatory, shocked, angry: “You’re not Adam.”

\---

Sam had him pinned up against the tree that he’d been leaning on, hands clutching his shirt and fingers curled into fists, the Winchester’s face inches from his, red with rage.

“You tricked us,” Sam hissed in his face. “You never _were_ Adam. Where is he?”

He didn’t answer. Sam shook him roughly for good measure.

“ _Where is he?_ ” Sam demanded, louder.

Michael’s lower lip trembled. “Adam’s dead.”

\---

Adam hadn’t lasted very long in the Cage, cramped in there with two archangels perpetually at odds. He’d tried keeping to his own corner for as long as he could manage, but eventually he’d just...withered. 

Michael hadn’t known what to do – he’d spent so much time taking care of Adam as best he could while they were down there, and suddenly all he was left with was a body that was growing colder by the second.

And so, to keep at least _some_ part of Adam with him, Michael had taken Adam’s body a second time.

An empty body for an empty angel.

\---

Sam had let go of Michael’s shirt before Michael finished telling his side of the story, and now the two of them stood staring at each other. Michael could tell from the flicker in Sam’s eye: the middle Winchester was wondering whether he should punch the former archangel or not. 

“This whole time,” Sam finally breathed. “He’s been dead this whole time, and you’ve been... _wearing_ him. He’s _dead_ and we can’t even bury his body.”

Michael crossed his arms in front of his chest and his body puckered in on itself in defense. “I didn’t...” He tried again. “I didn’t intend on taking his place. I didn’t want to cross paths with you and Dean. But when you found me, I didn’t know what else to do.”

“You could’ve come clean,” Sam snapped. “You could’ve told us right off the bat who you were.”

Michael lowered his gaze to the forest floor and said nothing. 

They stood there in silence for another few moments.

“We can’t send you back to Heaven,” Sam finally said. “Metatron’s kicked all your kind out and de-angeled them.”

Again Michael said nothing; he knew the situation. 

“You need to leave.” Sam’s voice cracked; he might be addressing Michael but he was still looking at the face and body of his little brother. “You need to just...you need to go. You can’t stay here. Not with his face.”

“What will you tell Dean and Kevin?”

Sam looked off into the distance for a moment, struggling to come to terms with what he was saying, as though he couldn’t quite believe the words coming out of his mouth. “I’ll tell them you just left. You ran off. I couldn’t find you. They’ll be pissed but they’ll get over it.” He sounded as though he were trying to convince himself, not Michael. “They’ll move on eventually.”

Somehow Michael doubted that, but he knew that over time, they would forget all about Adam. They’d already done it once. What’s another instance of forgetting? 

Michael caught Sam’s eyes in his own but the other man looked away quickly, trying to hide the fact that he was near tears. 

“I thought we’d saved him,” Sam murmured quietly. “I thought we’d finally...”

Part of Michael wanted to point out that picking Adam off the side of the road years after he’d already been damned to Hell wasn’t ‘saving,’ but figured this probably wasn’t the right time. Instead, all Michael offered was: “If it makes any difference, I loved your brother.”

Sam forced a small, derisive chuckle. “I had a feeling.”

\---

Everywhere Michael went for months after Sam had exiled him, he introduced himself as Adam. It didn’t matter if he was shaking someone’s hand or ordering a drink at a coffee shop or simply signing out a library book: he continued to call himself by Adam’s name.

He knew it was seven kinds of wrong, but he couldn’t accept the alternative. 

That is, until one night while he washed his face in the bathroom of the Massachusetts hotel he’d been staying at for the past few days. He’d just finished drying his face when he caught sight of his – Adam’s – face staring back at him in the mirror.

Michael touched a hand to his pale cheek and said out loud what he hadn’t said since that day with Sam in the forest: “Adam’s dead.”

He watched his lips form the words but still couldn’t believe it enough to accept it.

“Adam’s dead. My name is Michael, and Adam’s dead.”

Michael’s gaze searched the face that wasn’t his, from his jawline to his cheekbones to the gentle slope of his nose to the gold hair dusting across his forehead. 

When Michael finally looked at himself in the blue eyes, he couldn’t find Adam there anymore.


End file.
